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Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Mike Whitney — Obama Stepped Back From Brink, Will Hillary?

The American people need to understand what’s going on in Syria. Unfortunately, the major media only publish Washington-friendly propaganda which makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction. The best way to cut through the lies and misinformation, is by using a simple analogy that will help readers to see that Syria is not in the throes of a confusing, sectarian civil war, but the victim of another regime change operation launched by Washington to topple the government of Bashar al Assad.

With that in mind, try to imagine if striking garment workers in New York City decided to arm themselves and take over parts of lower Manhattan. And, let’s say, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decided that he could increase his geopolitical influence by recruiting Islamic extremists and sending them to New York to join the striking workers. Let’s say, Trudeau’s plan succeeds and the rebel militias are able to seize a broad swathe of US territory including most of the east coast stretching all the way to the mid-west. Then– over the course of the next five years– these same jihadist forces proceed to destroy most of the civilian infrastructure across the country, force millions of people from their homes and businesses, and demand that President Obama step down from office so they can replace him with an Islamic regime that would enforce strict Sharia law.

How would you advise Obama in a situation like this? Would you tell him to negotiate with the people who invaded and destroyed his country or would you tell him to do whatever he thought was necessary to defeat the enemy and restore security?….

"the likes of Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Victoria Nuland, Tom Friedman, the New York Times and Washington Post editors"

These are ALL Jews...

They want Hezbollah eliminated and Assad wont do it... so time for new leadership who will...

I dont see how Russia sees it in their own best interest to ally with Hezbollah and not the west... they seem hell bent on going back to the old Soviet arrangements... they might just get what they seem to want...

Hezbollah didn't exist until AFTER the illegal Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The Israeli plan was to annex southern Lebanon. The Shias of southern Lebanon defeated the Israelis and their plan for a greater Israel. That makes them evil. Anyone who repels an illegal invasion and restores the independence of their country is clearly demonic and needs to be wiped out, preferentially with US weapons and US cash.

They want Hezbollah eliminated and Assad wont do it... so time for new leadership who will...

The Zionists want the Shiite Crescent — Iran, Syria, and Herzbollah — replaced by Sunnis controlled by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are Wahhabi (literalists) and Salafi (primitivist purists). Many of these are Takfiri, considering all muslims that are not fundamentalist Sunnis to be apostates subject to death. The muhajideen aka jihadis are Sunni takfiris.

"The chain of command likely ran from the government of Iran; to Iran's Ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, located in Damascus; to Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Hossein Dehghan in Beirut as the Iranians drew on assets in Lebanon.[2] Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria have continued to deny any involvement in any of the bombings, even though the Iranian government erected a monument in Tehran to commemorate the 1983 bombings and its "martyrs" in 2004."

And it ain't "even" yet not even close ... I dont see this debt never being collected ....

Bush 2 attacked the wrong country I have to agree with Trump...

Should have went right after the terrorists wherever they were and isolated Iran setting up the coup de grace...

Instead he used the political capital to attack Iraq as Saddam tried to have Bush 1 assassinated so there was a bunch of personal things going on there... and meanwhile totally f-ed up the US wartime economy ending up bankrupting the US banking system...

Hillary and Obama apparently view themselves and the world through enormously different lenses but the deep state, MIC and the rest of the institutional bureaucracy that isolate the President from the world and information, also tightly control their access to people and information, and then they meet and brief POTUS on topics to pretty much narrow down and spin the possible policies either candidate will see as options. By the time a decision on strategy is necessary, they completely diminish the possibility that a president would exercise independent free will that goes outside the institutionally accepted parameters.

There was no invasion of Israel in 1967. As is the norm, there was an Israeli invasion of its neighbours. Everyone now accepts that Israel initiated the war. For decades the myth that there was an invasion of Israel was accepted. Now practically nobody who knows anything about the war accepts that. When that absurd myth of an Arab invasion collapsed, the myth then took on another dimension: the surrounding Arab countries were about to invade and Israel launched a pre-emptive war. Nobody now believes that either. Just about everybody understands that Israel was the aggressor, as it usually is, in order to create a greater Israel.

Anyway, why should Hezbollah be considered a terrorist organisation? Because they brought to an end the illegal occupation of their country? Even the most anti-Hezbollah Lebanese refuse to accept that and consider them patriots who could do what the pathetic Lebanese army could not do: repel an aggressor and free its country from occupation. Hezbollah isn't a terrorist organisation because Washington says it it. The ANC were also considered terrorists by Washington. The Viet Minh were considered worse than terrorists by Washington. Just about every popular national liberation organisation is considered a terrorist organisation by Washington. The reverse is more likely to be true, as most people in the world attest: Washington is the greatest terrorist force in the world, having destroyed a good deal of the planet on farcical pretexts.

And let's not forget that Hezbollah is the biggest political party in Lebanon. It won the most recent general election, but was unable to form a government because of the sectarian constitution imposed by colonial France. Lebanon became a confessional country, in which pro-France Christians would always be in government, no matter what their population. Although Christians are a minority in Lebanon, the sectarian constitution ensures that Christians will always have vastly disproportionate political power.

In international law, no outside country has the right to deal violently with any organisation outside their jurisdiction that they consider terrorist. The country which hosts the so-called terrorist organisation is required to deal with this organisation if a UN security council is passed. No such resolution will be passed, and Lebanon will not enforce such a resolution because almost everybody in Lebanon considers Hezbollah heroes. The most the so-called "international community" can do if they passed a resolution is to enforce sanctions on Lebanon. That is the law.

Matt, you're believing and repeating the American zio and Evangelical (most of them) fairytale. Alan Hart, British reporter, covered it contemporaneously. Got the footage. Got the facts. He subsequently became friends with both Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat, and he wrote about it. John is correct on the history.

The Christian Right didn't give a rat's ass about Israel or Jews until Menachem Begin called up Jerry Falwell in the late 70s, and said I know we don't see eye-to-eye from a religious POV, but we can both agree on the scourge of homosexuality. Falwell agreed. Begin said we need to get rid of that homo-lover Jimmy Carter and restore real morality. Begin was furious about Camp David. He was humiliated. He wanted Jimmy Carter out. Because he knew Carter was coming in for Phase Two and he wouldn’t have any of it. So he and Yitzak Shamir hatched a plan to undermine the US prez, and get Reagan elected. Begin knew he had powerful Jews in Reagan's CA kitchen cabinet who could mold Reagan; Reagan was under control. That I know because I heard it first-hand.

Begin refused to talk to Reagan when he got elected. He would only talk to Reagan through Falwell. This built Falwell's power. Like overnight. Falwell would call Reagan and relay messages. All of a sudden, Falwell was a political power; his vanity turned the Evangelicals into a can-do-no-wrong cheering section for Israel. Reagan could only communicate with Begin through Falwell. It was the rise of the Christian right as a powerful voting block until that Colorado (?) mega-church pastor was caught photographed getting gay massages and engaging in rough gay sex, what? 12 years ago? Falwell bragged that he had a red phone on his desk just for Reagan. Took pictures of himself with the phone.

Frank Schaeffer, the son of Evangelical theologian, pastor, and uber-icon Francis Schaeffer, told this story about ten years ago. Frank subsequently left the fold disillusioned. But he said he was a true believer for years and recounted the tremendous power the Evangelical movement in government circles wielded through the 80s and 90s. He was witness to it, met every powerful Republican in office because they all came hat in hand to his father, and he was in on the inside.

I don't know how old you are, Matt, but you've got the whole thing skewed.

We don't have Russia's capability.https://sputniknews.com/military/201610131046285777-russia-energy-weapons/

William Cohen, Clinton's Republican SecDef said the same thing at a meeting I attended in the late 90s on 57 St on NYC. He was warning not to assume the Russians don't kwow what they are doing. He said they have tech we can't replicate.

Matt: "This is a laughable statement from the pov of the US I can tell you that... nobody here thinks that way... and we maintain a very large military establishment to back it up..."

I agree. As everybody knows, the US is a law unto itself. International law and the Geneva conventions are for others. After all, the US is the self-declared "indispensable nation" and "exceptional nation", meaning that all others are dispensable, unexceptional and nothing more than trash to be disposed of by the self-righteous political priesthood in Washington. The worst of the lot are the so-called "conservatives", who are little more than reactionary nationalist warmongers. Traditionally "conservatives" wish to uphold the law, especially the international laws that the US itself drafted and to which it is a leading signatory, are anti-war and are suspicious of national power. That's all gone, replaced with stupidities about being "indispensable" and "exceptional".

Washington's hubris will be met with nemesis. Unfortunately, a lot of innocent Americans will face this wrath. For a country so steeped in the Bible, you'd think the millions of churchgoers would be aware of what befalls arrogant and wicked nations. But then the arrogant and the wicked never see themselves as such.

John, don't let the Dems off the hook. Madeleine Albright made a show of American exceptionalism when she backed the war in Kosovo. As SecState it was her rationale. That and her statement at the time that if you've got a good military, why not use it. (Of course, we since discovered she was having an affair then with that good-looking young head of the KLA with the mean eyes known as "The Snake,” the guy Geraldo Rivera went all goo-goo eyes over.)

Hillary the same; she pushed Bill to bomb Yugoslavia because the Clinton faction assumed Milosevic was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague exonerated Milosevic this past July of these charges after all this time, after he died in jail in 2006 when the US refused to allow medical care for his heart condition. The NYT and WashPo gave it short shrift with a singular online mention.

You had to read about it in Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/01/the-exoneration-of-milosevic-the-ictys-surprise-ruling/ or from John Pilger in a brilliantly pointed article. The subhead notes, "NATO’s war on Serbia in 1999 was the template for other “humanitarian” wars – in Iraq, Libya and now Syria – but it wasn’t “news” when the Serbian leader was cleared. Cleared of "war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica," the Albright and Clinton rationale for bombing Kosovo and Belgrade in the first place, which installed a criminal Albanian Muslim gang in Kosovo (KLA) that cleared up the land drug routes for heroin through Bulgaria to the Adriatic Sea that Milosevic had banned."The Bogus ‘Humanitarian’ War on Serbia"https://consortiumnews.com/2016/08/24/the-bogus-humanitarian-war-on-serbia/

The US problem is the lack of adequate info and the lack of a good thorough general education. Nobody reads in this country. Our university snowflakes cower in safe spaces and cry over trigger words. Our press is stupid or misinformed. Our congressmen are either stupid or too scared to talk.

In the meantime, the Chinese are sending their brightest to poach a top-notch engineering education with US funds or scholarships—they openly admit it—and we stupidly allow them to return to China, and now they're getting a hands-on education in movie-making because the third Emanuel brother is helping to sell Hollywood to China (April 2016).The Chinese investors on the stage with Ari Emanuel readily admitted the information heist. Rahm Emanuel did NAFTA and the 1999 China-Most-Favored_Nation status for the WTO. (Rahm bragged that he "kicked NAFTA over the goalposts," and called his WTO move "NAFTA on steroids." See John Nichols 2003 article Trade Wars) Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel was the architect of Obamacare. These three are leading Democratic movers who only become patriotic when it involves Israel. Rahm is busy these days destroying Chicago and decimating the Black community.

I’m beginning to understand why Mike Norman has thrown in the towel, and says he’s just going to concentrate on making money from this cretinous brew.

MRW, I'd never give the Democrats a pass. Frankly, I can't decide whether I hate the Democrats or the Republicans more. All this depraved nonsense about being "indispensable" and "exceptional" started with Clinton, and has gone gangbusters under the vile Obama. Killary will no doubt dial it up a notch.

As much as we all respect Mike and understand why he's thrown in the towel, I personally can't do it. I think Trump's mentally retarded cabinet choices and batshit advisers was the last straw for Mike. If British politics descended to the American political lunatic asylum, it'd be hard not to throw in the towel too. Trump seemed different and it looked like people could get behind him. But all he's proven to be is a fucking stupid motherfucking clown, who'd have been a disaster for working Americans. I mean, for fuck's sake, all he had to do was keep his fucking mouth shit and he's have defeated the despised Killary. Now he's going to get crushed by that psychobitch and she's itching to hand social security over to Wall Street, keep the financial fraud going, start some wars and keep aiding the jihadis like she did in Libya and elsewhere. Although you have to wonder how long Wall Street will be in business once Killary turn New York into Aleppo 2.0.

MRW you are blaming Falwell for all the Evangelical support for Israel this is not possible... These people are true believers the Falwells, Robertsons, Grahams, Hagees , Dobson, etc..are just the pin up boys for that whole belief system...

Nobody here cares about MENA ex-Israel the whole place could collapse into the earth and nobody would care...

This is why the whole "Benghazi!" thing doesn't work for Trump except for ex-military whose votes he already has locked up...

People on right hear Trump say "look what Hillary did to Libya!" and they think "good for her!"... or he says "Libya is a disaster!" and they think "good!"...

These two are all anti-Israel which doesnt go well with the OT oriented Evangelicals or they are terror states which doesnt go well with our warrior/martial class or both....

I think if Trump wins he is going to try to make a deal with Putin to flip Russia over to our side... if its a good deal and Putin still doesnt take it then its going to get interesting with Trump... Trump might not react to that very well....

The polls prove that people know almost nothing or have been brainwashed into believing total nonsense, like the large minority of people who still think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, or that Israel has never attacked its neighbours, or that US foreign policy is nothing other than a reflection of Christ in action, as if Christ would be training and arming barbaric apocalyptic monsters in Syria and elsewhere. You really have to stop and ask yourself, why are so many people paranoid and unfavourable about Iran when it is almost unique in modern history in NEVER having attacked any other country? But they are favourable about their own foreign policy, which is nothing less than a history of mass murder and subverting democracy. That's because they don't know the truth. As was said about a different context, the truth will set you free.

The other thing the polls prove is how bigoted people have become through a daily diet of media and Washington lies: Muslims are all the same, so if the wrong ones die, it's not a big deal; or they're a source of evil, so it's good if they die. They think nonsense because they've been fed self-serving nonsense by the media and Washington. The only thing they concern themselves with is whether one of our boys gets hurt over there. And these people have the temerity to call themselves Christians?

And what, if hundreds of millions of innocent men, women and children suddenly died by being swallowed up by the ground, people will continue as if nothing happened? If this is true, these people are no better than Nazis, who had precisely the same philosophy of superiority and callousness. You should be worried if people think like that. I don't believe people genuinely think like that at all: they're conflicted because they know none of this adds up, but are subject to propaganda wrapped in the stars and striped day in and day out they don't know where the truth lies. They feel unpatriotic if they call bullshit on their representative democracy, their military and how disfigured the national culture has become. As it stands, very few Americans distrust Washington completely. The Greens and the Libertarians understand that Washington is a source of extreme violence, depravity and theft. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it has become an abomination on the earth.

As for Trump on Russia, I would dearly love to see Trump get elected just to pop this bubble that people have. It's Obama all over again. This is wishful thinking. There is zero chance Trump will change or change US policy, even if he fervently wanted to. Anyway, once installed as POTUS he'd soon change his mind.

"Nobody here cares about MENA ex-Israel the whole place could collapse into the earth and nobody would care..."

Forty years ago that was the attitude towards southeast Asia.

Not so long ago it was the godless niggers. Before that it was the pagan red man.

Forty years from not that'll be the attitude about China.

It's good to have permanent enemies to keep the citizens pliantly dumb: oh holy Washington, holy military-industrial complex and holy Wall Street, point me at the new enemy. I am ready to sacrifice my life for those in the Hamptons.

Americans are similar to whatever empire seeks to dominate the rest. The people don't ask questions as long as the tribute is flowing and their armies are winning, but when the empire finally totters and falls then the rest of the world asks how a people could have been so crass and cruel as to go along with their psychopathic rulers as they pick through the pieces.

It's a historical pattern.

Now researchers suspect that it is in the genes, making humans are violent even toward their own kind.

BTW, the empire now is not just Americans but the whites (West) and their cronies that are non-white. The contest now is between East (predominantly non-white) v. West (predominantly white), and the Global North (predominantly white) v. the Global South (predominantly non-white). The non-whites have the numerical advantage and while the whites have superior technology. The technological gap is closing.

More pro-war than now. It was largely students, anti-war vets, and activists. Like now there was a US media propaganda blitzkrieg including against the US anti-war cohort. After the US withdrawal (defeat), the prevailing meme was that the US stabbed in the back by leftists at home.

It's somewhat ironic and bittersweet that Dylan was just award the Nobel in Literature for his sung poetry, which was anti-war and anti-establishment at that time. He had a big countercultural political influence in the protest movement then, which is largely absent so far today other than in pockets online.

Of course, there was no net then, and communications was through the underground press similar tosamizdat in the USSR.